Caldera Raises $15M to Build Metalayer, ‘Connective Tissue’ Between Rollups

Caldera, a rollup ecosystem helping projects deploy their blockchains on popular stacks with a single click, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Founders Fund, with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital, and Lattice, among others.

According to the press release, this latest round of funding brings Caldera’s total capital raised to $25 million.

The team will use the funds to advance its unified rollup network Metalayer, described as “the connective tissue” between rollups on the Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and ZK stacks.

Metalayer is an omnichain, all-purpose abstraction layer for rollups utilizing different frameworks. It “enables unparalleled interoperability while streamlining the developer experience, making it possible for Ethereum to be truly web-scale.”

The network integrates with the largest rollup ecosystem, the team said, benefiting from network effects to improve efficiency, security, and scalability.

Anirudh Pai, a partner at Dragonfly, noted that he is impressed by Caldera’s ability to innovate and execute “at what I believe is the bleeding-edge of rollup design.”

He finds that the Metalayer “brings us closer to the end-game of blockchain scalability and will crucially oxygenate the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Within 2 years, we've helped 60+ top teams like @apecoin, @MantaNetwork, @rarible deploy high-performance rollups.

Today, Caldera chains secure $800M+ in TVL & have executed 60M tx.

It's time to unify rollups across @arbitrum, @optimism, @zksync & @0xPolygon with the Metalayer. pic.twitter.com/IDzL6lLlvP

— Caldera (@Calderaxyz) July 24, 2024

Removing the Major Obstacles to Rollup Deployment

Caldera enables blockchain projects to deploy a rollup with one click and handles the entire process, including deployment, maintenance, security, low fees, customization options, and 99.99% uptime service-level agreements (SLAs).

This solves several issues, the team argued.

Firstly, it eliminates the need for an in-house engineering team.

Additionally, it removes obstacles for deploying and maintaining rollups, including high costs, slow processes, and risks associated with hiring protocol and site reliability engineers.

Hypernative is partnering with @Calderaxyz 🤝

Largest rollup ecosystem meets real-time threat monitoring and response!

Blog: https://t.co/j3UlR5X1dV pic.twitter.com/rA4Ii7S91V

— HypernativeLabs (@HypernativeLabs) July 18, 2024

According to the announcement, Caldera currently supports over 50 rollups with 1.7 million unique wallets holding over $800 million in total value locked and completing more than 59 million transactions.

Chains include Manta Pacific, ApeChain, Treasure, Plume Network, Towns, Kinto, RARI Chain, and Zero Network by Zerion.

Caldera was founded in 2022 by CEO Matt Katz and CTO Parker Jou. They previously worked at major companies such as Nvidia, Apple, Waymo, and Skiff.

Furthermore, the leadership team includes experts from Web3 and traditional technology companies such as Coinbase, Google, Scale AI, Jump Trading, and Amazon.

‘Unified Developer Experience’

Caldera’s Metalayer network provides Web3 teams with a suite of tools for launching high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups, the announcement said.

For a unified developer experience, the project brings together major stacks and uses frameworks like Arbitrum Nitro, Optimism’s OP Stack, ZKsync’s ZK Stack, and Polygon CDK.

According to the announcement, “by integrating core ecosystem projects and L2s into its technology, Caldera is helping to broaden the adoption and use of the Ethereum blockchain.”

The noisy neighbor problem is the biggest reasoning to launch an appchain as a builder.

Appchains with an extremely customizable setup will become the new norm, in our opinion. https://t.co/8ShtAbh7uV

— The Rollup (@therollupco) July 17, 2024

Joey Krug, Partner at Founders Fund, commented that Caldera is capturing two core markets:

• major existing projects looking to launch their own rollup;
• new teams that may not have the capital or infrastructure to launch their own chains from scratch manually.

Krug further argued that the crypto space has matured enough to support developers’ ability to choose their own modular stack. This has happened “much in the same way the web evolved away from monolithic infrastructure to more modular services based ones in the cloud.”

Caldera allows them to choose a data availability (DA) layer, execution layer, and settlement layer for their rollup or chain.

This, Krug said, is the future of how protocols and apps will be built as it allows developers to focus on core products while Caldera handles the underlying infrastructure.